'One day, promised the boy, one day they would fly away together, to a place far from here and far from now.' Tormented by bullies at his public school, Timothy Dashwood has begun to have strange and vivid dreams in James Miller's Lost Boys (Little, Brown £12.99, pp275). High in the branches outside his window a boy appears, beckoning Timothy and promising liberation, something other than the emptiness and loneliness of his privileged life in London. The urge to follow becomes irresistible.

His father Arthur is back in England after surviving a kidnapping attempt in Baghdad, where he worked for an oil company. The family had only recently returned from Saudi Arabia and memories of the East haunt them all - swimming pools, armed guards and the stares of innumerable dark-skinned children outside their compound.

When more and more middle-class boys begin to go missing, it becomes clear that there will be a revolution - that the alienation and disillusionment of Western children is equal to that of the worldwide dispossessed in a modern dystopia in which Peter Pan's Lost Boys have become jihadists and there are cameos from a one-handed Captain and a brutal, combat-booted Tinkerbell. The bones of JM Barrie's Pan are cleverly used to build a tense and thoughtful fantasy novel. The author has likened his debut to JG Ballard, William Burroughs and Golding's Lord of the Flies and their echoes are clear in his voice - engaging and urgent, but not yet quite his own.

Escape of a different sort preoccupies playwright Jim Cartwright in his debut novel, Supermarket Supermodel (Doubleday £12.99, pp330). Linda Dripping works the tills in Safeshop, content with her quiet life up north, until, one day, a dark, mysterious stranger offers her fame and fortune as a supermodel. But nothing has prepared her for the fickle world of global fame. Drugs, champagne, paparazzi and a new circle of famous friends surround the newly dubbed Crystalline, making life at home with Mum seem impossibly far away.

Cartwright has created a sweetly naive heroine in Crystalline. Her rise and fall (and rise and fall and rise again) are equally touching and funny. If Cartwright has a weakness, it is for being a little too in love with his walk-on characters, who are often given too much of an opportunity to tell their stories before a swift, usually final, exit.

But exits don't get more final than the one faced by Delia in Debra Adelaide's The Household Guide to Dying (HarperCollins £12.99, pp475). Diagnosed with terminal cancer, she spends her last few months doing what she has always done - writing frank and witty 'how to' guides for the domestically hopeless. Her household guides to the laundry, the kitchen and the garden have all been smash hits, and she hopes the last one in the series, her no-nonsense primer for dying, will be just as successful if not more so, given that merely being alive qualifies someone as a potential reader.

But there is also her family to attend to, a freezer to be stocked, a coffin to be decorated (if she can get her husband to stop leaving his coffee cup on it) and a complicated past to be laid to rest, all the while facing a non-negotiable deadline. Dark humour and a dash of schmaltz mean this novel is surely destined for commercial success.

Success eludes Thomas Lynch in The Bellini Madonna by Elizabeth Lowry (Quercus £14.99, pp304). A disgraced US academic, Lynch has retreated to the English countryside in pursuit of a lost painting by Bellini that may have ended up in the hands of James Roper, an aristocrat from Berkshire. There, he is thrust together with Anna Roper, James's great-granddaughter and as much of a mystery as her ancestor. Lowry has perhaps been too successful in summoning the voice of a middle-aged, middlebrow academic. Lynch's descriptions of the world are overwrought, but it's clear from the beginning that there is likely to be tragedy ahead as art, sexual power and history collide.